The recent War on the Rocks podcast, World Wars and the Craft of History, featuring Michael S. Neiberg, was an interesting and relatively short segment (at least it seemed to go by fast while sitting in traffic!) talking about Neiberg’s work studying WWI and America’s involvement in it. One of the things that I enjoyed […]

Each month VFS publishes a monthly newsletter in which we share recent writings and publications, thought-provoking scan hits, and news about company goings on. We currently have three editions of the newsletter: Political Futures: focused on domains such as the futures of governance and of conflict and security Economic Futures: having a more business and […]

Part 2 of the three part #CrowdedSeas fiction and futures project is now available at CIMSEC. Written by Scott Cheney-Peters and Richard Lum, and using both fiction and foresight, the project is exploring the future of security in the maritime domain in the 2030-2050 time horizon. Part 1 of Crowded Seas was published as part […]

Now that both feet are firmly planted in the New Year, it’s time to share our 2017 “Quick and Clean” scenarios for conflict and security. Using the quick and clean scenario framework from the 4 Steps model (see below the line), we have quickly developed four scenarios about conflict and security looking out over the […]

Happy New Year! Now that we’ve hit our shiny New Year, it’s a great time to give a shout out for my book, 4 Steps to the Future: A Quick and Clean Guide to Creating Foresight. I published 4 Steps last year as an easy-to-use guide for generating foresight and I’m very grateful for the […]

It’s that time of the year again: time to reflect on past accomplishments (and disappointments, let’s be honest) and time to look forward with renewed hope to the new year. Inevitably, this time of year sees many of us looking for prognostications about what the new year will bring as well as new tools and […]

A recent article in The Guardian cited an April 2016 report from the British Standards Institute that attempts to lay out guidelines for the ethical design and use of robotics. The report itself has to be purchased (£158), but the post lists a few of the areas it addresses: robot deception robot addiction self-learning systems […]

A piece yesterday noted that Taiwan asked Google to blur its satellite images of one of its islets in the South China Sea. This is not a surprising thing, and it reminds us how much we are becoming dependent on – or simply impact by – the various layers of digitally mediated reality. One has […]

An article this morning in Claims Journal online entitled, “Autonomous Cars’ Effect on Auto, Cyber Insurance” reminds us that one of the reasons we sometimes get forecasts wrong is that we fail to anticipate how changes – no matter how disruptive – inevitably feedback and drive attempts to adapt to the change. The impact of […]